December is always a short month but that hasn't stopped us ploughing through the feedback and suggestions. Here is what we got done this month.

Quick Add: Tasks, Milestones and Projects

One of the areas we really wanted to improve on this month was making it easier and faster to add tasks to your Teamwork account. Not just from within a project, but from any part of the app.

You'll notice a new feature in the top right called "Quick Add" Read More

Move or Copy a task list to another project

Before today, moving tasks between projects was a painful process. One by one...move...move...move...repeat until you die of boredom.

This month we added the ability to move entire task lists between projects. All tasks, comments, time logs get moved with one swift action. Read More

Move Milestones between projects

Since we added the ability to move Task Lists between projects, we decided to go one step further and also add the ability to move Milestones from one project to another. 

Sorting added to the Project Chart

Last month we released a new version of the Project Chart. The feedback on this has been excellent but it was missing a sort option. This month we added in the ability to sort by Start Date, Project Name and Company Name.

Blinksale now added as an export option for billing

A few months ago we integrated Freshbooks and Harvest with the Billing section of your projects. This month it was time for Blinksale to get some love. From today you can export your time and expenses to Blinksale! Just in time for the New Year invoicing :-)

Notebooks get a word count and resizable editor

Many people use Notebooks to draft letters, blog posts or PR releases. Sometimes it's handy to know how many words you have written. We also added the ability to resize the Notebook editor vertically! Spot on for long content...

Preview of new Everything->All Active Tasks page

The Everything->All Active Tasks page is by far the most used page in the app. It also needs to be the fastest and most customizable page in the app so this month we worked on improving this. Our aim was to reduce the clutter in the filtering bar, make the results faster loading and add in paging. Mission accomplished. We put an option for you all to try it before we roll it out next month.

Updates to the Workload Report

The Workload report is a great way to see how busy people are. This month we extended the report so Administrators in the Owner Company can now see all estimated tasks across all projects even if they are not explicitly on a project. Small but extremely useful addition.

New 24 hour Calendar time picker

When we launched the Calendar on Teamwork we thought we localized absolutely everything. We were wrong. People who use military time formats still had to use the am/pm type time picker. Not anymore!

Small Ticket Items

• Projects: When a project is renamed, it now creates a new Activity Log item
• File Thumbnails: We finally tracked down and killed a slight bug of incorrect thumbnails for files named the same.
• Time: When logging time and choosing a task, we shaved 1 mouse click off by not being dumb asking the user to click a button to finish
• Time: When logging time and choosing a task, we now show the people the task is assigned to
• Reply By Email: We improved this so Archived projects do not get new messages and comments added to it. We send an email back to the sender.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: We added a few more and fixed an issue on Mac Firefox when quick-switching tabs using CMD+number
• API: Various updates and documentation additions

So that wraps up 2011. We have some great plans for 2012 so keep an eye on our Roadmap!

We would like to thank everyone who took part in last months newsletter competition to win an iPad 2.

The draw took place on the the 7th of December using Random.org to make sure it was fair. The winner, drawn out of the virtual hat, was Nick van Silfhout, from Textcetera in the Netherlands.

I also asked Nick for a few words as well on what they do at Texcetera.

Textcetera is a graphic design studio that creates publications in all forms: from regular printed books to the newest standard of eBooks.
We also design ads, book covers and other graphic illustrations.Since we have an average of 100+ active projects, it’s essential to have a decent project management system to efficiently streamline the workload.
We use TeamworkPM to keep track of the project status and it helps us to unite all the information about a project in one place.
The basic functions of TeamWorkPM give us great peace of mind in a chaotic branch!
To read more: www.textcetera.nl (Dutch only, unfortunately)

Thanks again to everyone who entered the competition.  Make sure you keep an eye out each month for the newsletter which will have all the latest news from TeamworkPM, as well a chance to win a few goodies from time to time.

Moving task lists from one project to another is one of them. Yesterday we added this feature to Teamwork.

No sooner was it released and the feedback started to pour in asking if it was possible to "Copy" the list instead of "Moving" it.

No problem. Today we rolled that feature out.

This also has a hidden benefit that may not be apparent right away. In Teamwork you can save any task list as a template. This only saves the names of the tasks, the estimated time, the descriptions and the privacy. There are good technical reasons for this.

Now, as you can copy any task list to any project, you can have a project set up to act as a "Template" which you can use if you need to create a new list with all the people assigned, due dates assigned etc

Hope this small but useful feature helps everyone! Send us a tweet and let us know what you think :-)

Once you are in a project on Teamwork it's really easy to add tasks to the project. Sometimes though a phone call comes in from a client or you think of a task that needs to be added before you forget. This means browsing to the Project you want, clicking the tasks tab and finding the task list you want to add the task to.

By the time you've done that you may have forgotten what the task was!

One of the areas we really wanted to improve on this month was making it easier and faster to add tasks to your Teamwork account. Not just from within a project, but from any part of the app.

From today, you'll notice a new feature in the top right called Quick Add

The most useful is the Quick add tasks. Over the last few months we've received countless emails and feedback messages from people who want a faster way of getting tasks in to Teamwork. The majority of people wanted to dump tasks in and deal with them later when they get time.

Our second idea was to simply allow tasks to be entered one by one. As you add a task, the box clears and you can add another one. It worked but it was still not 100% of what we were trying to achieve.

Then we got it right. We thought of how easy it is to create multiple tasks by email. It's simple. Each task you want to create just goes on a new line in the email. We also had added the ability to assign the tasks to people, set a due date, set the priority and of course the privacy and notification options. This is what we wanted from the Quick Add feature.

When you open the Quick Add Tasks feature, there is a box where you type your tasks and a select tool to pick your project.

(download)

Click here to download:

quickly-add-tasks-milestones-projects-from-anywhere-in-your-teamwork-project-manager-account-JGxtuznHEHzcpzJGyBjv.zip (273 KB)

You can create 1 task or you can create 100 tasks. Each task just goes on a new line of the text box.

You can assign people to each task, set a due date and a priority - We added a quick help tooltip so you'll never forget how to do it.

Lets look at some examples:

• @dan [today] Write a blog post on the new Quick Add Feature
  • This will create a task called "Write a blog post on the new Quick Add Feature"
  • It will be due today
  • It will be assigned to Dan
• [tomorrow] @sam @peter @dan Add an FAQ on the website about quick add items !!!
  • This will create a task called "Add an FAQ on the website about quick add items"
  • It will be due tomorrow
  • It will be assigned to Peter, Sam and Dan
  • It will be of High Priority
• [25/12/2011] Answer any Christmas Day feedback
  • This will create a task called "Answer any Christmas Day feedback"
  • It will be assigned to "anyone"
  • It will be due on the 25th December 2011

The order of the items doesn't matter. We'll figure out the people, dates and priority no matter where in the task it appears

The @person is worked out by joining the firstname and the lastname of the user together and figuring it out

For example, my name in Teamwork is Daniel Mackey so any of the following would pick me out:

• @dan
• @daniel
• @danielmac
• @danielmackey

The dates just need to be in square brackets and you can use a real date such as [25/12/2011] (or [12/25/2011] if your date format is set to that) or you can use Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, Next Monday etc

So that's it. It's live now and we're really happy with it. Let us know what you think!